Rudyard Lynch is the host of the What If Alt History podcast and YouTube channel, where he talks about all kinds of stuff, from managerialism to history to the work of Sam Francis to what might be happening after this amazing victory from Donald Trump.
00:03:15.080So I did that for the first seven years.
00:03:17.400And then as we moved from a Simpsons America to a Blade Runner America, I gradually pivoted the content more towards anthropology and philosophy and history and that stuff.
00:03:32.180And I've been doing that for the last, I would say, four years where it's been a gradual evolution as I've learned more.
00:03:41.320But I would say now the current content is just trying to explain a world that doesn't make much sense.
00:03:58.440Like I said, you made some pretty important predictions before the election.
00:04:05.080I want to see how you feel about how things shook out, where you might think things are going.
00:04:08.960And then also you told me you wanted to spend a good amount of time on Sam Francis and his book, Leviathan, Its Enemies, which is something I, of course, would love to talk about and can go on for quite a bit.
00:04:18.340So we're going to dive into all that in just a second, guys.
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00:05:24.800All right, so let's begin with a little bit of contemporary election reactions.
00:05:32.340The hot takes are always the way to open up.
00:05:35.380You famously had a debate on Tim Pool.
00:05:38.940You've been talking about how we're going to get to civil war.
00:05:41.800Now, I have not predicted civil war, but I have predicted, as you know from the book, things coming apart slowly.
00:05:48.200Less kinetic, a little more the slow disillusion of kind of our central Leviathan and the empire that it maintains.
00:05:57.340But looking at what has just happened here with this Trump victory, what do you feel the status is with kind of this conflict in the United States?
00:06:05.480I have become known as the revolution guy because, and that's what I've gone on most of my podcasts to discuss, where I believe that the U.S. will have a revolution or civil war within the next six months.
00:06:25.760And I stand by that, and I have a bet with my friend Andrew Heaton that we will have a thousand politically motivated deaths by April.
00:06:33.980And I understand that sounds ridiculous, but I can explain why I believe that.
00:06:40.100And what I frequently tell people is that the world is not reasonable or rational, and expecting it to be reasonable is, in fact, profoundly unreasonable.
00:06:51.360And I've studied how people in the past predict the future, and I consistently find the error that people over-predict for short periods of time and then under-predict for long periods of time.
00:07:06.200And the way history normally works is that you have an event, and then it's just like thunder and hurricane.
00:07:12.340And people assume things will happen in a more gradualistic process than they often do, where you look at the end of colonialism, you look at the fall of the Soviet Union, you look at World War I, the Thirty Years' War.
00:07:25.880And for a historic era to change, you need a tremendous amount of social tension, which builds up over time into a big event.
00:07:34.600And I've studied several different historic models for why I believe America will have a civil war or revolution.
00:07:42.260And when I say civil war or revolution, I like to say I'm betting against God.
00:07:47.040And what that means is that to predict the world, you have to understand every variable because everything is connected, and that's physically impossible.
00:07:54.380So I don't pretend to be correct all the time, and especially so for short periods of time, my predictive abilities crash.
00:08:02.300But I think America will have a violent conflict, and the four historic parallels I use the most often are the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the fall of the Roman Republic, and the American Civil War.
00:08:17.220And so I tease out parallels between them, and I could get more so into the reasoning for why I believe this, but I think it will happen as a side effect of the transfer of power involving this election.
00:08:32.200And if I'm wrong there, which I may be, my next guess is I think we'll still have a conflict like that, but it would be caused by probably a budget crisis.
00:08:41.560And I don't think we can get out of the next four years without a conflict like that.
00:08:47.220Well, I famously have a cigar writing on roughly the time frame you've predicted, so I hope you're wrong because I don't want my country to burn down.
00:08:55.840But, you know, if you're right, I do get a cigar out of it, and that's really important.
00:09:00.000One thing that I have, you know, thought about a lot about, like the first thing that really shook me, and I've had doubts previously, but what really shook me out of kind of my conservative talk radio, you know, bromides, was what happened with COVID, right?
00:09:16.500Like, I kept hearing constantly, when, you know, tyranny comes, that's why we have the Second Amendment, and people will rise up, and they'll never allow this.
00:09:25.120You know, there'll be a bright line in the sand that when they close the churches, I mean, obviously, that will be the moment, and, you know, people will really fight back.
00:09:33.880And so that was really my disillusion with the idea that there would be any real violence on the right.
00:09:38.660I mean, the left screams about January 6th and all that garbage, but, you know, no one even showed up with a weapon, you know?
00:09:45.960So the idea that that's a real insurrection of any kind is just a complete joke.
00:09:50.120But, you know, I did think that the left still had violence in them because we saw what happened with the riots, and we saw what happened, you know, BLM and Antifa.
00:09:58.180These are still people who are regularly ready to go to battle.
00:10:01.400And so I assume that even though the right had kind of petered out on its revolutionary fervor, the left might take itself to a violent conclusion if it fed itself enough of its own rhetoric, these kind of things.
00:10:12.300That's kind of what I assume going into this election.
00:10:15.020But it felt like at the end of this Trump victory, there really was just this complete exhaustion from the left in that moment where, okay, Trump's winning.
00:10:28.780Even at a Madison Square Garden rally in the middle of New York where they're calling this guy a fascist who's going to end democracy.
00:10:35.920Just nobody cared, and nobody bothered to show up.
00:10:38.400And so my question is, you know, again, in my book, I thought it was more of a slow disillusion than a violent conflict.
00:10:44.340I think I even might double down on that at this point because it feels like even if things get worse materially for most people, you really would need a drastic crash.
00:10:55.280Like, it can't just be a slow decline like we are talking, you know, people cannot eat tomorrow type situation if we're going to see anything change.
00:11:03.400So there's a couple of different points there.
00:11:06.440So give me a second to hit each one of them.
00:11:09.020So for the first side of it, I think this is going to happen sooner rather than later, and I think this is going to be a brief, something that happens pretty quickly because a handful of different variables.
00:11:23.400The first of which is that Peter Turchin is a data scientist who studies civilization, not civilizational, but state collapses.
00:11:34.600And so he's an author, and I'm pulling from a handful of other authors, like David Hackett Fisher is a great example, the Strauss-Howe cycle, et cetera.
00:11:43.420And they all point to there being a conflict in America in the 2020s, and you look at the previous conflicts in American history, such as the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War, and the World Wars, is that there was tensions that built up until it snapped.
00:12:07.140And it was often unclear to figure out what would occur before the conflict until the conflict happened, where in the American Revolution, the Brits kept pushing the Americans around, and then there was mutual instigating events until it culminated.
00:12:26.860And I believe this will happen sooner rather than later because I'm looking at a variety of statistics.
00:12:34.140The one that scares me the most is debt, where the speed at which we are piling up such an enormous amount of debt is historically unparalleled.
00:12:44.860We can't keep going with this debt for another few years, and if you keep doing so, it's just going to completely destroy society.
00:12:53.160And if you look at the English Civil War, if you look at the French Revolution, if you look at the French Wars of Religion, they were all caused by budget crises, where one side refused to give another side a concession.
00:13:05.440Second part of it is that the average American is careening very close to bankruptcy now, and as inflation hits, cost of living goes up.
00:13:16.820And so you're at this cross point where the government has to keep printing inflation, but at the same time, the cost of living goes up, which pushes people into poverty.
00:13:26.000And if the current trends continue, and I don't know why they'd stop, the average American is going to hit bankruptcy in the next year, as is the country is going to hit bankruptcy.
00:13:36.140And what a civil war or revolution does is it provides plausible deniability for one faction to avoid an issue they're getting at.
00:13:45.080So if we have a revolution or civil war, both the Republicans and the Democrats have plausible deniability to have basically a debt jubilee, which is what they need to to restart.
00:13:54.600And for my final point, the statistics Peter Turchin looks at are average income, income inequality, and competition for elite jobs.
00:14:09.700Those three statistics in 2010, he predicted would result in a civil war in America in the 2020s.
00:14:17.260And then if you look at other statistics where David Hackett Fisher studied inflation and there have been even stuff like you can look at height, you can look at sleep time.
00:14:27.520When the average age of marriage gets above 28 historically, you're going to have a civil war.
00:14:31.760And so all of these wellness metrics are butting up against a cliff where you basically have to have a war in order to reset them.
00:14:42.200No, I certainly agree that there is a necessary threshold that is being approached.
00:14:53.120And I guess, you know, I'm just not sure how quickly we will hit it.
00:14:58.220I think you're right that at some point, there's simply too much.
00:15:02.340The financial system, as we understand it, too many people are invested for us to make any kind of course correction.
00:15:08.280And so what we'll continue to do is kind of accelerate while throwing these kind of weird patches, you know, time and again, trying to kind of mediate the negative effects on some different groups when they happen to win a particular election or get a seat at the table.
00:15:24.340But ultimately, I don't I don't see the system turning around, though.
00:15:29.400Honestly, multipolarity might kind of solve that problem if you want to call it at a solution in a way when you when the U.S. doesn't have kind of infinite space to expand its economy across a global empire and dictate kind of the economic operations of the rest of the world.
00:15:48.260That might require a haircut, whether we like it or not, but perhaps that would would bring about the collapse that you're talking about.
00:15:55.820The variable I keep bringing up time and time again is I don't think people understand the desperation and poverty and just mental health issues of the average American, especially the young people who are the people who fight in wars.
00:16:10.300If we did a survey of Americans in their 20s, we would just find absolutely horrifying results.
00:16:16.660And this is like I've studied a significant amount where I've compiled well-being statistics among Americans.
00:16:21.800And I think we're at the point where this can't sustain if this if the war starts in three years.
00:16:27.760I accept that. But I don't think we can get past the next four years.
00:16:31.200And what I would also say is we don't view history as a fundamentally psychological process, but it is.
00:16:39.000And when we're looking at at the current results of this election and I'm happy that we got this result, I'm very happy, but I don't think this is going to solve the underlying issue.
00:16:50.000And when you look at how the left reacts, you're dealing with fundamentally a psychological process because their motivations are the motivations of a mentally ill person.
00:17:00.100And so they're reacting through their mental illness, not to the outside world.
00:17:04.020And what I can sense is that we've hit such an emotional fever pitch with almost like a psychological thunderstorm that it has to come crashing down in order to lessen the pressure.
00:17:17.400Because when you look at these and you look at political radicals today, they these are people who are basically on the psychic and psychic edge of breaking down.
00:17:29.320Yeah, I think in addition to just the the life pressures and the mental health pressures, you know, we're also facing a end of civilizational meaning crisis, you know, the type of thing that, you know, I'm a big fan of Oswald Spangler.
00:17:47.000And I think that his kind of morphology of civilizations is relatively accurate.
00:17:56.320And we really are in this kind of late civilizational winter when it comes to the loss of metaphysical and transcendent understanding, the rejection of this on pretty much every level.
00:18:08.280We're also deep in the grip of money power.
00:18:10.540And, you know, he says that oligarchy is only ever going to be broken, you know, by the events that that you're kind of discussing now.
00:18:19.440And so I think ultimately, in kind of the historical cycle, you're you're on good footing.
00:18:25.260It's not what anyone wants to hear, of course.
00:18:28.000You know, everyone wants to hear that small adjustments or maybe even really bold major adjustments will will put us back onto track.
00:18:36.760And I don't want to be a deterministic downer in the sense of, oh, well, we should just not bother then, because if things are bad, you know, you they're they're just going to get worse because a historical cycle says so.
00:18:48.540But I do think there is a certain level of humility that needs to be understood about how much you can change kind of the zeitgeist.
00:18:55.680Yeah, I spend a lot of time trying to explain to conservatives kind of long, fundamental political truths, and I usually hear them back like 80 percent of the time.
00:19:07.500And then when it comes time to apply them, I recognize, oh, nobody got it.
00:19:11.360And we're actually just doing exactly the same thing over again.
00:19:14.020And so it's one of those things where, you know, even if people can mouth the words of like, yeah, we need change, we need reform.
00:19:36.080OK, I'm going to give you a treat here.
00:19:37.720He is my favorite author, and he's a Spenglerian author who takes Spengler's philosophic ideas and applies them to broader things.
00:19:45.820So, for example, he wrote The Coming Caesars, which is one of the things I'm pulling from, where he compares Western to classical civilization.
00:19:53.120And he was writing in the World War II era, where he said America is the new Rome, and he predicted there to be a fall of the Roman Republic moment in the 21st century, which is what I'm pulling a lot of my info from.
00:20:04.280He also wrote The Soul of India and The Soul of China, which are the best books on explaining those civilizations I've read.
00:20:12.380He also wrote Sex and Power in History, which is about how the relations between men and women and how those gender roles result in the rise and fall of civilizations.
00:20:25.500Because there are archetypal issues with an over-masculine and an over-feminine civilization.
00:20:30.120And finally, one of my favorite books of his is The Eye of Shiva, where he compares ancient Hindu teachings to modern physics.
00:20:39.160And he explains how the Hindus were able to figure out a lot of modern physics principles 2,000 years ago.
00:20:46.460Interesting. All right. I'll have to check that.
00:20:49.460Add that to my ever-growing pile of history that I'm just never getting through.
00:20:53.760I'm working through Heidegger right now, and I hate reading Heidegger, even though he's insightful.
00:20:59.740So I get like 100 pages in, and then I go read a whole other book just to reward myself, and then I go sit back down and do the next 100 pages.
00:21:06.840At this point, I've given up reading 19th century German philosophers.
00:21:11.360At this point, I try to read Spengler.
00:21:44.760Maybe it's just that, you know, certain books talk, you know, this is going to sound stupid for some people, but certain books speak to you.
00:23:05.980Yeah, but like where did you run into it, I mean?
00:23:08.020So, I ran into Sam Francis because I read a book called After Liberalism by Matthew Rose, which was about all of these post-liberal, post-Christian rightist thinkers.
00:23:21.800And he talks about Sam Francis, Avola, Spengler, and two other writers I'm forgetting.
00:23:30.500And so, I got into Sam Francis due to that.
00:23:33.080And the thing that got me interested in it was trying to figure out how modern society uses power.
00:23:41.060Because I would say through wokeness, wokeness really confused me about why it happened.
00:23:48.520Because the incentive structure that results in wokeness has to be really bizarre because…
00:23:57.220We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.
00:24:27.800Everyone's actions make sense in the context they're using them.
00:24:32.560And wokeness is so patently absurd, that must mean the incentives are completely broken to reach that point.
00:24:38.240And Sam Francis really explains, for those that don't have context, Sam Francis was a conservative figure in the 20th century.
00:24:46.840And he was really into studying James Burnham work, James Burnham's work on the managerial revolution.
00:24:52.780And so he wrote Leviathan and its enemies, which is an incredible book, where he goes through the origin of the managerial class's dominance over America, their right to rule, how they did it, and what their goals are.
00:25:10.520And I thought the book was brilliant because it literally explains wokeness.
00:25:18.060It explains its strengths and weaknesses in a way that I think conservatives need.
00:25:22.460Because when you're fighting the left, you're not fighting the left.
00:25:25.280You're fighting the bureaucracy, which uses the left as its religion.
00:25:28.600Yeah, that is something that I think is really important.
00:25:32.560Obviously, James Burnham's work in the managerial revolution is interesting because it follows a tradition of other people in what many people call the Italian elite theory.
00:25:44.460He's using Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca.
00:25:47.940It's kind of this class analysis, but from the right frame.
00:25:52.340And so, you know, obviously he was a Trotskyite as he was writing this book, so he's still got kind of those Marxist priors, but he's discovering this kind of other, you know, entire understanding of how to do class analysis that doesn't have to hold on to the Marxism.
00:26:10.620He brings in, okay, this is why the Industrial Revolution and massification and, you know, the increase in the ability to produce, consume, and mass indoctrination through mass media.
00:26:23.500Like, these are all critical aspects that create the need for centralization.
00:26:27.580But he doesn't hit on, like you said, this kind of ideological fusion with wokeness, like what ended up being critical to the spread of this.
00:26:37.200And Sam Francis takes the time to really explain why kind of the radical left and the mainstream did not jive in the 60s, but slowly grew together in the, you know, in kind of the 90s, 2000s in a way that most people, I don't think, understand.
00:26:53.560That's why so many classical liberals, as they like to call themselves today, which is just disillusioned leftists, they don't believe anything classical liberals believe.
00:27:00.220But these people will always say, oh, well, I believe something different from wokeness.
00:27:04.800Like, no, you believe a stepping stone to wokeness.
00:27:07.960And so you're surprised that your leftism eventually met its inevitable outcome.
00:27:14.560Not, you know, not the things that existed previously that were going to get you there where you didn't understand they had a problem.
00:27:20.260Yes, I'm glad you picked up on that, because I thought that's one of Francis's most brilliant points, where he talks about the alliance between the new left and the, sorry, consensus liberals and the new left.
00:27:32.840And the consensus liberals are basically the rationalist, Reddit, the science trademarked, that demographic.
00:27:40.880And then the new left is mother goddess, Wicca, intuition, your truth, divine feminine.
00:27:48.100And these two pretend to be different.
00:27:51.040And I guess they are different, but they play this shell game where the new left says something completely deranged.
00:27:56.280And then the consensus liberals say, hey, we get that.
00:28:00.540But if you make this small, reasonable step for progress, then it's going to be good for all of us.
00:28:08.060And the reality is the consensus liberals just stack bureaucracies with their supporters so that they can enable whatever they want.
00:28:15.180And there's two sources that I think explain the ideological side of wokeness the best, because you're right that Sam Francis didn't cover it much.
00:28:24.160One is Kurt Doolittle, where Kurt Doolittle basically talks about, he covers evolutionary strategies.
00:28:32.420And he and I don't agree on everything, but there's several things he's completely brilliant on, where he talks about how wokeness is a strategy of maximizing parasitism.
00:28:43.460And it's a worldview that completely abdicates responsibility that allows the highest amount of free riding ever.
00:28:50.520And I combine that with McGill, Christ's master and his emissary.
00:28:54.340And so I call wokeness feminine materialism, where it's a combination of a purely materialist worldview with the toxic feminine.
00:29:02.700Yeah, bio-linitism works somewhere along that line, if you're familiar with that idea at all.
00:29:12.120But I do think it's very interesting that now we're at this moment where obviously wokeness drove itself so hard and so fast that there does seem to be a certain level of, like I said, exhaustion from the left.
00:29:28.800Not that they don't believe these things still, but ultimately it seems like at least their willingness to do violence on their behalf has waned somewhat.
00:29:38.140Do you see the wokeness being put away?
00:29:41.300Do you think there's another strategy available to the managers and the left for their continued expansion of power?
00:29:46.860Can they moderate this ideological strain to the point where they can maintain it?
00:29:52.320I'm glad you asked that question, because my answer is relatively complex, where I refuse to have an opinion on this topic for the next four months, because with the election, I get the sense the left is about to do something.
00:30:08.520I don't know what it is, because with their current low rate of emotion, it's unclear if that's the tide pulling back or if it's just the water level going down, because it could be that this is the buildup for a bigger event in the future, where in the same way that before a tsunami or before a storm, everything is dead quiet.
00:30:33.160I don't know. And so I'm going to wait the next few months to see which of that's the case.
00:30:38.020My suspicion is that the left was flabbergasted by losing this hard.
00:30:42.860And so they're basically in a place of panicking, trying to figure out their next move because they're so emotionally motivated that their followers have built up all these emotions that has to be released.
00:30:54.100And if they don't release those emotions, they're going to cannibalize their own leadership until they get a leader who rationalizes their emotions.
00:31:02.860And I think it's on a growth curve. It's on a decline curve where it's often the case that an empire will reach its highest geographic extent when it's already in decline.
00:31:13.580And so for wokeness, I think they stopped converting any new people around 2020.
00:31:20.060And so the question is, with their current group of followers who are extinct in the long term, because they're devolving into an insane cult that is actively pushing for its own suicide.
00:31:31.000The question is, what do they do in the process of committing their own suicide?
00:31:35.920One of the things I like to tell conservatives is the left wants to lose, where you look at degrowth, you look at them trying to destroy their own countries, they're trying to destroy their own social institutions.
00:31:47.860Every single leftist institution, if you watch it, you will find that they are actively, and this is one of the reasons why I think we'll have a war, because the left burns through their social capital so fast that they end up putting themselves in positions of desperation very quickly because they burn through all their options.
00:32:04.780And so I don't know, but I think the left's going to try something, and it's unclear what that is yet, but I think they've built up too much emotional tension to go away quietly.
00:32:19.720Now, one alternative could be a true circulation of elites, like not a, oh, we got a new guy in the White House and a couple of, you know, cabinet positions change, new FBI director, problem solved, you know, the same dumb stuff conservatives have done a thousand times and then watch the left just run all over them.
00:32:40.160But, you know, a lot of people have pointed to the rise of Elon, the support of David Sachs, you know, Marc Andreessen, there's a lot of Silicon Valley oligarchs behind Trump at this point.
00:32:54.020It's very clear they're going to take a much more active role in his administration.
00:32:58.040And it's also clear this time that Trump is familiar, at least, you know, the people who are going to be in charge of a lot of his organization are familiar with the fact that the administrative state and, you know, the managerial regime are a real thing.
00:33:11.600You don't just, you know, you don't just, I wave article two in front of people and say, I'm the president, you do what I want.
00:33:16.280Like, you actually have to make a significant change inside these organizations.
00:33:20.140He's talking about dismantling the Department of Education, these kind of things.
00:33:23.540Of course, every Republican since Ronald Reagan has made this claim.
00:33:26.700But the point being, you know, it seems he's much more aware and he would perhaps have the ability this time and kind of the rogue elites necessary to force that actual elite rotation.
00:33:49.560The, so I think the left knows subconsciously that they're parasitic and they know subconsciously that they don't add that much to society.
00:33:59.840And I think people have multiple tiers of consciousness.
00:34:04.000So what they're saying publicly is not what their evolutionary hardwired actual brain thinks.
00:34:10.620We've found consistently through anthropology that people are very good at deceiving,
00:34:14.400and even themselves while pushing a completely different evolutionary strategy.
00:34:17.760And I think the left, for example, the reason the left went full throttle with Obama is that a reasonable person would look at the election of the first black president as a point where America can take race down a few pegs as its dominant consideration.
00:34:34.180And the left realized, wait, we have to seize total control of society so that the public doesn't get rid of us.
00:34:41.400And I think there's this innate desperation in the left at the realization that they could be completely replaced by the people you described.
00:34:48.920We could even just use AI to completely, we could use AI to replace the managerial class almost completely.
00:34:55.940AI, the internet, and wokeness are the three things that could kill the managerial state.
00:35:00.680And so I think we're in this weird, awkward moment now where the left realizes that their time is short and that they have to seize power.
00:35:10.120Actually, you wrote out this really well in The Total State, where I liked your point that cancel culture is an outcome of a leftist elite terrified of the internet.
00:35:19.720And what I think is going on now is the left is looking for excuses to shove Trump down because he is the leader that the non-managerial coalition rallies around.
00:35:31.180And if Trump's gone, it's going to be way harder to find the new leader.
00:35:36.140But the problem is that they're in a place of very little plausible deniability because Trump won the election.
00:35:42.560None of the legal stuff has stuck to him.
00:35:44.740But I think the left will spend the next few months desperately looking for anything that they could give some degree of plausible deniability to try to seize power over.
00:35:53.640And I think it's going to ultimately fail because this election has given Trump basically the mandate of heaven.
00:36:00.460So if the left tries any shenanigans, the military will side with the right against the left.
00:36:48.740And he's a big fan of leaving the human behind and letting, you know, intelligence automate our way out of this.
00:36:56.280But also, you know, the rest of humanity as well.
00:36:58.220I'm less a fan of that aspect, but I do think there's a real concern there, which I guess brings me to the point of this stream or the way I titled this stream, because I wanted to ask you this question specifically in relation to the things we're talking about.
00:37:14.420Because AI is a way to maintain complexity while basically removing the human security system, right?
00:37:22.360Like we don't need to tie this to a specific set or class of people.
00:37:26.160We can automate the complexity and continue kind of our centralization and scaling.
00:37:31.780But I think the problem is the centralization of scaling.
00:37:34.340And so I wonder, is there a way that civilizations can, you know, maintain their sovereignty, not be destroyed by competing larger civilizations while not becoming this like all-encompassing centralized state?
00:37:50.400Or is this simply the cost of doing business in kind of the current paradigm?
00:37:55.740This is the third question in a row you've asked that's really spot on.
00:37:59.360So I want to congratulate you on that.
00:38:01.040And this is a conclusion I came to in the last week.
00:38:05.280So it's good you asked me this question now.
00:38:07.500And I've congregated like five authors on this topic to reach the conclusion I've reached, where Balaji does a really good job with this, where I think Balaji has pointed out that you're in a place now where the network is fighting with the state.
00:38:25.080And the state is a 20th century technology, and the network is a 21st century technology.
00:38:29.800And we are at a very key moment in the history of the internet where I believe that this moment could determine the entire rest of the future.
00:38:44.660And the real question with the internet is, is that a private or is it public?
00:38:57.400And if we, in the next, let's say, 15 years, if we establish technological systems through which data is private and through which the internet is a private, non-government managed organization, humanity is free.
00:39:12.340Because if you can coordinate through the internet, independent from the government, it's the return of the Middle Ages, where you've massively decentralized the power the state has.
00:39:22.880Because back in medieval Europe, people didn't just organize the state.
00:39:26.980Sure, you had the Kingdom of France, but you also had the Duchy of Brittany.
00:39:30.040You had the Hanseatic Merchant League.
00:39:35.060And so the internet opens up the network.
00:39:39.480And the network has the potential to destabilize the state.
00:39:43.020And I believe the fundamental question of our time is life or death.
00:39:50.460Because, and I mean that in multiple ways, where Nietzsche said that after the century of nihilism would come a philosophy built around human life.
00:39:59.820And I think we're really hitting up against that threshold, where we have to realize that the technology we're building exists to enable life.
00:40:11.780And I support using this technology if the ultimate goal is enabling life.
00:40:15.840Because if you don't go down that path, you end up with a society with three morbidly obese, mentally ill people with robots doing everything else for them.
00:40:25.960And you've killed off everyone else in society.
00:40:28.000Because with AI and automating and that stuff, the natural trajectory of the current elite is to basically push for really, really horrible stuff.
00:40:37.980And I think if we actually knew what the WEF style elite was pushing for, we would be completely horrified.
00:40:44.100Because I think they're actively trying to use AI and automating to make the current working population redundant.
00:40:51.520And I think this is going to be the fundamental struggle of our time.
00:40:57.140Yeah, no, I certainly agree with that.
00:40:59.780I mean, it's very clear that you have this scenario where they're trying to phase out while encouraging a large amount of the third world to move in to what was the first world.
00:41:12.740They're also phasing out all of the things that that would do, like all of the manual labor, all of the low skilled labor.
00:41:20.080These things are being automated away.
00:41:21.560Even a lot of the jobs that people aspire to to get degrees are going to be automated away.
00:41:27.260And what this creates is this scenario where everyone assumes you can just move people to, you know, the grain dole or, you know, basic income, you know, this kind of stuff.
00:41:39.820But I think that those are always just dying models for civilizations.
00:41:43.760Like this is always how a civilization kind of enters a phase of decadency and destitution because people need purpose.
00:41:53.640They, you know, it's not enough for people to just have something to do and something to eat.
00:41:58.180You know, they have to be tied to real identities and real meaning.
00:42:02.440And all of the things we're trying to automate and all the things we're trying to remove are going to remove those things.
00:42:07.940They are only going to worsen that condition.
00:42:09.980Yes, the material, you know, large estimate may continue on some level.
00:42:14.660You know, you'll have indoor plumbing and electricity and all these things.
00:42:19.080But if you continue to create a society where fewer and fewer people have any real meaningful interaction with the destiny of, you know, with their destiny and the destiny of their society, that is going to lead you to revolution just as fast as anything else.
00:42:46.740So I'm basically going back to where I grew up, even though Philly, Philly's pretty different from the other Northeastern cities.
00:42:52.860Philly is more rust belt and avoided Philly avoided the managerial wealth boom of the post World War Two era, which I was resentful about as a teenager because Philly's gone to hell.
00:43:04.400But now I think it's the best thing that ever happened to us because you look at Boston and D.C. and New York and.
00:43:11.100Almost every single job in Boston is done by an immigrant.
00:43:14.360You walk around cabbies or immigrants, front desk people are immigrants, people doing construction or immigrants.
00:43:20.420And I have a lot of friends from Boston and they're basically stuck with no social mobility because there's this active attempt by the elites to make sure the current population is removed from the gene pool de facto.
00:43:35.320Because if you can't find work and only like 15 percent of Zoomers use dating apps and with all of that, you're effectively saying you're not welcome inside your own country.
00:43:49.280And we don't realize they're doing it because they don't say it, but they've done literally everything else to show it.
00:43:54.120And second variable, and this is one of the points I wish conservative media constantly harped on, is the left has declared war on life.
00:44:02.880Because you look at every single thing the left wants to get rid of, the nation, the family, religion, tradition, local ties, drama, war, virility, whatever.
00:44:16.400They're removing every single living thing in a society and they're trying to replace it with a bureaucracy that has no life at all.
00:44:24.700They're trying to kill society in a process of trying to improve it or improve it.
00:44:34.660I think it's difficult for conservatives because, you know, and I think this is changing, which is really good and helpful.
00:44:42.540But for a very long time, and certainly when I was paying attention to politics as a younger guy, the conservative movement was one of, you know, we kind of lost social conservatism, like the moral majority and stuff had failed.
00:44:55.740And, you know, it felt like the Christian, you know, as much as the left is screaming about Christian nationalism or whatever, the real force of the church and these things had really waned inside the right.
00:45:06.420And so the right of turn, it kind of turned into this, like, well, maintain corporatism, maintain the status quo.
00:45:14.060The libertarians hate it when I say that, but there's no better way to describe it.
00:45:17.680Like, you know, like, you know, let's be big fans of the economy and, you know, that'll kind of sort everything out.
00:45:23.680And it became pretty forbidden now, you know, to talk about things like, you know, the role that religion or ethnos or language or culture play in human meaning.
00:45:35.920And so it's hard for them to argue that the left is stripping away a lot of this stuff because the right surrendered most of it.
00:45:42.620They said, well, yeah, you should probably have families, I guess, but they don't do anything to encourage them.
00:45:46.940In fact, they actively, you know, it's the Ben Shapiro, hey, man, just move another job.
00:45:51.860And it doesn't matter if your entire family has, you know, built roots in a place for 300 years, just rip up all that social fabric and go to some random place and live there for a year until, you know, that job gets, you know, sold to India or something.
00:46:04.700Like, you know, that's the approach that conservatives have had.
00:46:07.840So they have a very hard time selling some kind of message of holistic life or meaning when they've destroyed all the stuff about identity that really matters when it comes to building.
00:46:19.720My father told me growing up the post-World War II consensus was the right got rich and the left got culture where every enterprising conservative guy in like the boomer era could make a lot of money and live and get a nice house in Florida.
00:46:34.860Well, the left got control of the culture.
00:46:37.680And the way I see things is that the post-World War II consensus, and I don't think you and I exist in the social that consensus where the thing that comes after it.
00:46:49.660But the consensus was the post-World War II era was so good that it made every reasonable person satisfied and the people who you could mobilize were the mentally ill people.
00:47:06.820And so the left got into power by seizing control of mentally ill people who were deranged enough to push for tactics that normal people wouldn't notice.
00:47:16.940And then the right became a complacent party of nice guys.
00:47:19.580And when I look at the right, we really need to get rid of that nice guy ethos.
00:47:24.300And of course, I don't think the other side is to be a deranged sociopath.
00:47:28.740There is a middle ground that is both dynamic and yet moral.
00:47:32.960But the thing that holds back the right most is that it, for decades, recruited nice guys who just wanted to say, I love my suburban neighborhood so much.
00:47:43.560And I want to keep my job and I want to keep having Christmas lights and whatever.
00:47:48.880And it's just the most base material, like status quo ism.
00:47:53.280Yeah, I mean, I feel that pull because I am certainly someone who grew up in that middle class, you know, and then eventually upper middle class.
00:48:03.980My father became an attorney, so we were doing a little better near the end of my childhood.
00:48:08.000But most of it, we were, you know, he was in the Air Force and, you know, we were just moving around, that kind of thing.
00:48:12.260But, you know, I had a really good childhood.
00:48:14.620I had one, you know, I remember a lot of 80s toy commercials and, you know, that kind of stuff has a certain level of nostalgia for me, flipping through the magazine at Christmas and picking out your toys and these kind of things are stuff that I still kind of think about and identify with.
00:48:33.960But at the same time, I know, obviously, that these are are just byproducts of a much more important foundation and that prosperity itself is not sufficient because I watched a lot of people that came from those neighborhoods and those backgrounds, you know, fade away spiritually, not have a way to connect with their parents, not have a way to connect with those that came before.
00:48:57.500And so, therefore, when, you know, these, you know, self-hating, like anti-white garbage or like all this anti-Western stuff, all this, you know, general hatred of Christianity in the West, they just kind of went with that tied because there's nothing they were tied down to.
00:49:12.620And I understand why you say like the left got the mentally ill people, but I try to avoid the, you know, the clinicalization of that stuff.
00:49:22.160Like, I don't think they're all mentally ill.
00:49:23.960I think it's just they've chosen a moral system that is not compatible with mine, you know, and so, you know, I think that ultimately you're really seeing people who were invested in unspooling the order as it was versus those looking to maintain it, which is the classic left right distinction in many ways.
00:49:44.140But I think that really is what organizes them is a bunch of people who otherwise could not be on top in a well-ordered hierarchical civilization, basically looking to generate political instability by unspooling every one of those institutions.
00:49:57.260Yes. I say mental illness because I think if you brought a medieval philosopher today, he would say our entire society is mentally ill.
00:50:07.440I mean, if you brought Thomas Aquinas or Isaac Newton today, he would say your society has lost God and then spiraled down the drain.
00:50:15.660And I think that's true of almost every faction today.
00:50:19.840But if you look at young left-wing women have four times the rate of mental illness as any other demographic.
00:50:26.740And this is the thing I ought to make a video about because it would take me a while to explain what I think the exact mental illness that leftist culture has.
00:50:36.680But to speak to something you said earlier is I really got interested in studying the ethnicity of America, where I tried really hard for a couple of months to research what is the dominant ancestral group in each part of America.
00:50:53.540And I'll send you the map I ended up making in Twitter DMs, but it was really difficult because there was nothing to research this stuff.
00:51:02.000I had to pull from really obscure authors. I had to look at like hundred-year-old censuses because nothing has been written about the ethnic composition of America.
00:51:12.140And I thought that's ridiculous because if a state is mostly English or German or Spanish ancestry, that matters a lot to the identities of the people in that state.
00:51:22.600And it shows how much this has permeated our culture already, that we can't even know about this stuff, which matters to us.
00:51:37.020And one of the very interesting details is that British Americans are a third of America's population.
00:51:42.300But in the old census results, it's like 7% because people didn't want to – what people do in America is they have one German ancestor and they say they're German ancestry, but they're really like a quarter German.
00:51:54.680And so it's crazy that the only two authors that have covered this topic are David Hackett Fisher and Thomas Sowell, both of which who are conservatives, because the left doesn't want to know what the ethnic composition of America is.
00:52:08.360They don't want anyone else to know that.
00:52:12.520If anything, they're trying to change it as quickly as possible.
00:52:16.120So what do you think that this means, drawing back a little bit on the election, for the future of American identity?
00:52:24.600Because I think we're at this point, a lot of America – and this is – I'm trying to think of – Clash of Civilizations was that gentleman's name.
00:52:42.920Huntington, you know, his question is who are we, as you just pointed out.
00:52:46.000He said this would be the defining, like, post-ideological question, right?
00:52:50.060We've moved beyond the Cold War ideological bipolar reality.
00:52:55.280So now the question for a lot of nations moving outside of this is who are we?
00:53:02.340And I think that the United States was moving, you know, in a direction that was very dangerous.
00:53:07.480Obviously, open borders, the constant need to import other groups in the attempt to undermine kind of the American identity as it was now so the left can continue to gain power.
00:53:17.240You hope a lot of this stops with Trump.
00:53:19.260But we also saw, in many ways, a shift, you know, a large – especially among Hispanics.
00:53:24.820There's only a very small amount among Black men.
00:53:26.920But Hispanic men, it was a big change when it came to supporting Trump.
00:53:30.440And I can't say that I see that going away for the Republicans in the long term.
00:53:34.960What do you think this means for the American identity as we hopefully attempt to reforge into something that – I know you're betting on civil war, so maybe this is a bad question.
00:53:45.300But what do you think this might mean if we don't devolve into civil war?
00:53:49.900America's already structured its identity several times as an example.
00:53:54.280So in the colonial period, we were British.
00:53:56.320The American Revolution was about the British government not giving us the rights that we were supposed to get given by God as Englishmen.
00:54:02.960After the revolution, it was that we were a republic.
00:54:07.100In the 1800s, we drew our identity once racial science became a better – a bigger field.
00:54:15.720And then in the 20th century – or then we drew our identity as being a frontier nation, then as a diverse nation, and now a nation of colonialism and oppression.
00:54:25.320And the colonialism-oppression narrative can't survive much longer because it's pure nihilism.
00:54:30.360And the short answer is I don't know because I think the identity that we pull out of this struggle with will be inextricably linked with the context of said struggle.
00:54:43.740Where whatever coalition emerges and wins, they will structure the identity based off what the unifying factor of their coalition is.
00:54:52.860And so one of the things, for example, is I don't believe America will become a minority nation because Hispanics are two-thirds European ancestry.
00:55:01.760So I think lighter-skinned Hispanics will be fused into being whites.
00:55:06.440And in the same way Jews and Sicilians have become white, I think a lot of Latinos will enter that category.
00:55:12.860Christianity is one of the better unifying factors in America where three-quarters of Americans are Christian.
00:55:20.540And in other countries, like in Europe, you have a Muslim minority.
00:55:24.200In China, you have all these ancient religions.
00:55:28.340And America could get a unifying Christian identity, but that would require the church really stepping up its game.
00:55:34.640Because religion's been in an incredibly rapid decline over the 21st century in America.
00:55:40.700In 1950, less than 1% of Americans were agnostic.
00:55:44.480I don't actually believe those numbers, but less than 1% said they weren't Christian.
00:55:51.720And most of that drop is in the 21st century.
00:55:55.500And I would say Christianity is one of the better options.
00:55:58.960But in order to turn that around, it would require such a massive ideological and intellectual change in the church that I can't count on that.
00:56:10.580Yeah. Unfortunately, I think you're right about that.
00:56:13.220I think you're starting to build a cadre of people who might push that direction.
00:56:19.100Young men are becoming more religious than young women for the first time in a very long time.
00:56:26.100And so that there's a possibility that you could see a generational shift.
00:56:30.760But obviously that has to be kind of, that's got to be boiling.
00:56:35.100You know, it's got to be working for a while.
00:56:36.840It's not going to be coming anytime soon.
00:56:41.980The church has been being feminized for the last 500 years.
00:56:45.180And so it would be difficult to reverse the trend and it would require an active decision because one of the interesting things is that for most of modern history, atheism was seen as masculine because you were a strong man who's capable of facing the world without God.
00:57:02.040And so the church became more and more feminized.
00:57:04.480An interesting thing is that you can correlate the feminization of the church with the increase of sexual sins.
00:57:11.200Because if you go back to the Middle Ages, sexual sins were relatively low.
00:57:14.540But as the church gets more feminized, they increase in importance versus other sins like pride.
00:57:19.840And you can see it also with the moving from the crusader ethic to the, I don't know, welfare ethic.
00:57:29.240I don't know what they call our current Christian or pseudo-Christian ethic.
00:57:33.640But for the first time, atheism is female-coded.
00:57:44.980You talked about the state possibly being outmoded versus the network, that you might see a different type of formation.
00:57:56.460Really, I don't think the state gets completely outmoded.
00:57:59.680Someone's going to have a monopoly on violence and they'll be the state.
00:58:03.220But they'll be more intermediate, I think, institutions.
00:58:07.140It will not be as centralized as you were pointing out there, like in the Middle Ages.
00:58:12.160And so I wonder, you know, previously those intermediate institutions, of course, were regional lords and these type of things.
00:58:19.360Also significantly, the church, guilds, you know, these were all things that pushed back against the pressure.
00:58:25.880And a lot of, you know, nationalists won't like this.
00:58:28.260But the nation itself is really an artificial construction that sublimates a number of tribal and regional identities into itself.
00:58:39.320It's a lot more modern than a lot of people would necessarily assent to.
00:58:47.080But do you see a break of, you know, away from those more national identities?
00:58:53.760And do you think that the intermediate institutions will be more technological in nature?
00:58:59.260Do you see them being spread out geographically, but society centering on kind of more ideological connections or religious connections through technology?
00:59:10.340Or do you think it has to, to some degree, return to a geographical concentration of people in order to really break away from this kind of Leviathan-style state?
00:59:22.360The biggest variable I don't know about in the 21st century is population, because the variable I just stare in awe at is the birth rate.
00:59:34.040Because with the current trajectory, the birth rate is crashing around the world more rapidly than any computer model could predict.
00:59:41.580And we have pretty wide computer models.
00:59:45.840And the reason I bring this up is that trends like this often don't last that long, because if a trend is that hard, it means it has to reset quickly.
00:59:55.020However, if we can reset our birth rate, we're going to look more at, if we can reset the birth rate, it will be more like the fall of the Roman Republic to the rise of the Roman Empire, where you have a social transition, where the ultimate underlying social order remains.
01:00:12.020If the birth rate keeps doing what it's doing, it's the fall of Rome, where under current trends, there will be four Koreans alive today at the end of this century for every 100 now.
01:00:25.400And that is the really scary variable I look at when I worry about the future.
01:00:31.840And I would think that the network would establish a weird combination of local alignments.
01:00:41.480Because keep in mind, with the network, with digital communication, you could move to Montana and be value aligned with lots of local people in Montana while you work a remote job based out of New York City.
01:00:55.880And in the previous timeline, you would have had to move to New York City for that job.
01:00:59.660But the internet allows geographic alignments of specific interests, while also allowing transnational alignments.
01:01:06.660And you look at medieval Europe, that's more so how it was, where you have, medieval Europe was strange, where you have this hyper-local concentration, where Brittany, this area the size of, I don't know, Delaware or New Jersey, Brittany was its own ethnic cultural territory that was very specific.
01:01:26.040But inside Brittany was the Catholic Church, which is transnational, merchant leagues, you had various marriages and dynastic alignments that spanned Europe.
01:01:38.540But this is all in the timeline where the state doesn't win.
01:01:41.320And I do not have that much interest in arguing over timelines where the state wins, because none of us are going to have this conversation if the state wins.
01:01:56.540Yeah, nobody, nobody who wants to have these conversations will be able to.
01:02:01.320So in this scenario, do you see a increase of complexity?
01:02:08.260Or is it going to be is it going to be localized, depending?
01:02:11.060I guess my question here, I should preface by saying a large amount of the infrastructure that people assume technologically exists around the globe is only really held up because a few first world nations expend a large amount of effort maintaining it.
01:02:28.920Like you just would not have these cell networks and these other things existing in the vast majority of the world that now thinks of itself as much more technologically advanced.
01:02:37.740If these kind of international players moved off the board or committed fewer of the resources to its maintenance.
01:02:43.920Do you see most of that shrinking away and it's staying only, you know, technological innovation only being localized?
01:02:50.220Or do you think that we've kind of hit a threshold and we'll maintain it through a certain level?
01:02:55.780The science fiction novel Fitzpatrick's War has one of the best predictions of the 21st century I've seen.
01:03:03.360And this book was written around 1990, where the book is set in the 25th century about the rise of an American Alexander the Great.
01:03:10.060But its backstory in the 21st century is fascinating, where in the 21st century, the world's population reaches a peak of 10 billion and then crashes down to 1 billion due to a combination of supply chain issues, genetically engineered plagues and war.
01:03:25.920Where what happens is that America over the course of the 21st century, from roughly 2020 until 2070, America has a series of civil wars where the Democrats get taken over by predatory inner city ethnic minority gangs and the Republicans become controlled by intentional communities of rural rednecks who move away from the complete degeneracy of American society.
01:03:52.960So the Republicans and the Democrats become captured by different demographics, and then the rednecks burn the cities down and America restarts its civilizational cycle, pulling from the land.
01:04:04.480And they have a series of they have a they have an organization of historians who study the cycles of history to engineer their future.
01:04:12.640The Muslims colonize Europe and the Chinese take over East Asia.
01:04:16.400And I don't think it would happen exactly like that.
01:04:19.520But one of the things I respect about the Fitzpatrick's war timeline is that it's a view of the future that's pretty in line with historic trends, because most science fiction involves the stripping away most science fiction is just the fantasy of the Leviathan.
01:04:34.120You look at Star Trek, you look at Star Trek, it's the complete stripping away of culture and religion for this communist expansionist post-scarcity society.
01:04:48.380And I'm sorry, what was the question you asked again?
01:04:52.140But basically, do you think that we're going to see a overall decline in societal complexity or if you think that it'll maintain in certain areas but fall apart in others?
01:05:08.880So one of the things when people look at the population growth charts is, for example, you would expect looking at the growth rate that Africa is the next civilizational superpower.
01:05:26.040Because if current trends continue, there will be 4 billion Africans by the end of this century, and China will have less than half its current population.
01:05:33.380However, that's not going to happen, because Africa is so dependent upon a series of technologies that the first and the second world produce, that if the first and the second world have civilizational breakdowns, which seems highly probable due to the demographics they have, Africa is dependent upon fertilizer, it's dependent upon international agricultural markets, it's dependent upon foreign electricity and cell phones.
01:05:59.820One of the things people forget is Africa is actually one of the places in the world most dependent upon cell phones and the internet, because they don't have a competitor.
01:06:09.500Because in America, you can use the postal service, you can use these pre-established communication methods that just don't exist in Africa.
01:06:18.560And so ironically, especially since Africa is poorer, if there's a situation where China attacks Taiwan, or where there's a disruption of global grain markets, Africa will be one of the places hit the hardest, because the first world will spend all of its money to buy up food, thus prices in Africa would skyrocket.
01:06:37.480Same thing with the, if China attacks Taiwan, and Taiwan can't make the cell phone chips for this anymore, the Americans will find a way to, we will eventually, even if it's incredibly painful, find a way to produce cell phones in America, in Africa, they'd be the ones hit the hardest.
01:06:57.060Yeah, a lot of people don't think about the fact that because they parachuted so much of that technology in instead of it being grown out of infrastructure, previously existing that it's just going to vanish, it's going to dry up and blow away like, like roots without soil, if something like that happens.
01:07:16.380We could probably do this all day, and hopefully we will again, but we have a large number of questions building up.
01:07:23.880Do you mind taking a little time to answer the questions?
01:07:26.460Do you mind if I run to the bathroom first, and then I'll answer them?
01:07:31.760While he's heading that way, guys, let me remind you that, of course, if it's your first time, make sure that you go ahead and subscribe to this YouTube channel.
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01:08:02.720If you'd like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, then you need to subscribe to The Oren McIntyre Show on your favorite podcast platform.
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01:08:13.960It really helps with the algorithm magic.
01:08:16.380And he's mentioned my book a couple times, which is very kind of him.
01:08:20.100That's actually how I ended up getting in contact with him, because a couple people said, hey, hey, he's mentioned your book on this show or that show.
01:08:25.860So if you would like to pick up my book, The Total State, and read about a lot of these themes that we have been talking about, then you can take a look at that.
01:08:33.840You can get it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million.
01:08:37.460You can pick it up at your own local bookstore if you'd like to avoid the machine as much as possible.
01:08:42.880I know a lot of people have asked me about getting an audio version of the book, and I have been fighting for that.
01:08:49.900And finally, it's going to be happening.
01:08:52.360So hopefully by the end of the month, I will have news on an audio version for those who I know I do a lot of reading in the audiobook format.
01:09:01.520So if you would like to do that, hopefully you'll have an opportunity to do that with The Total State soon.
01:09:32.720By the way, or sorry, Cooper Weirdo says, by the way, Oren, there's a protest here in Portland.
01:09:38.240Only 40 people showed up, but there was a protest.
01:09:41.560Yeah, again, I have to say, it just feels the left was just devastatingly low energy here.
01:09:47.260I mean, I know they knew Kamala Harris was a terrible candidate.
01:09:50.780It's got to strip a lot out of your soul to kind of like dance, you know, for this woman who is just obviously inept.
01:09:57.660But you think they would have had at least some fire left after Trump got elected, but just nothing, nothing at all.
01:10:04.200There's an interesting question about why woke people buy so little stuff, where if you look at video games or movies that pander to woke demographics, and there are lots of wealthy woke people.
01:10:19.520Look at how much funding the Democrats get.
01:10:21.820They just don't consume content because I imagine the ideology they have is so psychologically taxing.
01:10:30.140Yeah, I mean, I guess they consume like MSNBC and stuff, right?
01:10:38.820Like, you could almost hear the, you know, kind of the bed death as they were on, you know, after the, you know, I got home after we did our stream on the Blaze, and I just had to watch a little bit of what was going on the left.
01:10:50.480And it is just, man, like, I'd feel bad for them if they weren't evil.
01:10:53.700Like, it was really, really sad, like how devastated they were.
01:11:11.780Look, I'm, you know, if anybody has, you know, needs any, you know, information or any input on things to flip around, let me know.
01:11:21.860But I think the big thing is that this is the time where people can maybe build organizations and infrastructure on the right without getting punished.
01:11:32.760Your risk of cancellation is at an all-time low right now.
01:11:36.060The idea that you're going to get, you know, arrested or you're going to get debanked, like those things are, I think, those risks are seriously less than they were previously.
01:11:45.100And so I think local organization is as much as possible what you should be doing in this moment, because your success rate is probably never going to be higher.
01:11:53.620And your chance of being persecuted by the state as it exists is probably less than it's been in a long time.
01:12:02.980I was going to say coalition building and looking for competency.
01:12:05.820Yeah, competency is a huge one, right?
01:12:09.420Like, you know, we've talked about the circulation of leech and Turchin and, you know, elite overproduction.
01:12:15.340But a lot of this, you know, is a lot of guys who are who've been locked out of the system are building up in our places.
01:12:22.920There's a lot of ability that is just being left on the cutting room floor because people were, you know, male or white or Christian or something else that was not in vogue when it comes to these other ideological organizations and their selection pressures.
01:12:37.740And so this is a great time to to absorb a lot of that excess competency that's been expelled from those institutions and learn about organization.
01:12:47.540Like you said, you have to build competency in that stuff.
01:12:49.360If you can't, you know, you don't just walk into the gym and start benching 300, you don't just, you know, step into a room and organize 500 volunteers.
01:13:03.660You need to know how to build projects, do stuff that's not political.
01:13:07.300You know, do things that help your local area, you know, reading groups like this kind of stuff that's going to up your level and is going to build trust so that when people need leadership, you're just the natural guy.
01:13:19.360You have become an aristocrat of a sort through your action and through your ability to network rather than, you know, sitting around and like complaining about politics.
01:13:28.320Like this is really where you, I think, build that ability.
01:13:34.320Tiny Rick says, I don't think we can speak of the left as a monolith anymore.
01:13:38.600A cat lady isn't the same as a bureaucrat who isn't the same as a college kid.
01:13:42.020Like, well, of course, yeah, the left was never a monolith.
01:13:44.320I've done several different videos talking about different factions in the left.
01:13:48.640But what do you think about when it comes to dominant factions in the left?
01:13:53.940Do you think that there's anyone who might ascend in this moment, take over, push people out?
01:13:58.860You know, what do you think about the coalition on the left right now?
01:14:01.840I really dislike the chain of argument I just saw there because it's the whole thing of there are individuals in a group and thus you can't look at group level differences.
01:14:12.740And that's one of those arguments that got really popular in the 20th century that I think is it's a level of intelligence where you circle back to being silly.
01:14:31.360But then when everything said and done, even though there were a dozen kinds of French, France still fought as a unified nation for war after war.
01:14:39.840So when push came to shove, there still was this unified French group identity.
01:14:44.460And my attitude here is that if something manifests in the world, it's real, where if, for example, if a society has a really big regulatory system, if the regulatory system is affecting the society, it's something worth studying as an independent whole.
01:15:03.760Where the left clearly does act and there clearly is this unified force, because if there wasn't, we would be looking at a vastly different world.
01:15:14.180And the only thing I've really seen split the left apart was the Palestine issue.
01:15:18.320But even so, the leftist elite kept pushing while the they kept pushing the narrative forward, even while the pro-Hamas protesters split off into the same faction that said pro-Hamas protesters weren't actually able to create a schism inside the left that was able to operate on the group level.
01:15:39.140I would say it depends on your resolution of analysis, right?
01:15:44.260Like you could say Christianity works as a monolith in some areas, but obviously, like, it's also very, very different and very different.
01:15:52.900So it depends on what what layer you're trying to analyze at.
01:15:57.320I agree with you that the left manifests as a united front in many areas.
01:16:02.240But then if you want to figure out what's going on with the Palestine-Israeli split, well, then you need to get into the more granular analysis.
01:16:08.460Yes, things are what they are, where you should just see something for what it is and not let the level of analysis confuse you, where, sure, there are points where Protestants and Catholics work together.
01:16:20.440Sure, there are points where they kill each other.
01:16:26.540Cheers, been waiting for this crossover for a while now.
01:16:29.420Long time What If Althist viewer noticed an increasing number of Burnham-isms and Yarvan-isms in Rudyard's material over the last two years.
01:16:51.920I can tell he is very clearly intelligent, though, and I think his worldview is fundamentally not going to work in America.
01:17:00.580I just think it's not, it's fundamentally at odds with our underlying value, where if we do become a monarchy, it would be in a completely different way.
01:17:08.060But I think the things that I, the thing I admire Yarvan the most for is the cathedral and his caste system.
01:17:16.640I think his American caste system is brilliant.
01:17:19.960Yeah, I would agree that Curtis is a little too, he's a systems engineer, and so everything is a system for him.
01:17:26.460Like you can just, the people are, you know, are fungible, and it's really just about what system you apply to them.
01:17:31.700Also, I don't trust people from San Francisco when it comes to applying conservatism to the rest of the country.
01:17:39.280Because one of my friends makes objective cultural metrics, and I don't really like the word objective, but he establishes a bunch of different, he makes AI models for anthropology, and he says stuff like, this is your society's honor culture.
01:17:52.040This is how you express distance and relationships.
01:17:55.580But, and he go to personabilities.com and deep read Dan, but in his system, my hometown in rural Pennsylvania is as culturally distant from Silicon Valley as Germany is from Poland.
01:18:08.060And I think that's basically accurate, where Silicon Valley is this weird ecosystem that's so distantly removed from the general American public that they really struggle to find ways that will orient their worldview to someone from Tennessee or Florida or even upstate New York.
01:18:27.100Yeah, sometimes he's, yeah, I had him on the show, and he said something to the effect of, well, if the, you know, the founders were here, they would, you know, sympathize with the progressives, but they would find, you know, Red America, you know, somehow more degenerate or something.
01:18:43.300And I'm like, no, Curtis, I think the, I think the people chopping off the genitals of children would probably be the more shocking thing for the, for the founders.
01:18:50.520Yeah. Yeah. If the founding fathers saw us, interestingly, the founding fathers predicted socialism in advance, because they look to the Greeks and the Romans and the Greco Roman civilization, they had their own iteration of socialism in their Spenglerian cycle.
01:19:05.260And the founders knew that, which is why they were talking so much with the flaws of mob rule and of mob rule and democracy inequality. So they would see us as just this egalitarian, toxic force.
01:19:23.480Well, they would also probably think that we were demonic. I think if you took any pre-industrial society and dropped this today, they would say, all of your art shows demons. You people are completely disconnected.
01:19:34.400Yeah. You guys worship Satan. Yeah. I would not, I would not disagree with that.
01:19:39.880Max Woodridge says, what does mole bug mean when he says neocons are really Trotskyites other than his claims, state department CIA have always been leftist. I mean, he, he means exactly what he's saying. Neocons were majority Trotskyites. Like even Bane, James Burnham was literally a Trotskyite that became a neoconservative. So I think that's just accurate.
01:20:01.020I think his point, I think I know the piece you're, you're talking about. And I think ultimately his point is that all of these state department style institutions were basically created to be used by neocons or neocon ends.
01:20:15.040And so attempting to like restaff them is like turning Boeing into a, I don't know, gun manufacturer or something like that's not what it's for. That's not what it does.
01:20:27.060And so you don't just like change out some of the leadership and turn Boeing into like a municipal waste disposal company. Like much more of the, of the infrastructure and architecture was, was created specifically for the creation of an American empire.
01:20:42.420You have to dismantle that stuff. You can't just be like, Oh, well, we'll, we'll swap it out and change the mission.
01:20:48.580People forget Thomas Sowell was a, was a communist originally.
01:20:52.480So much of the rights, most brilliant thinkers are former communists, Thomas Sowell, James Burnham, probably half a dozen other people.
01:20:59.640And, and I mean, it's one of the issues I discussed that modernity, our real religion is communism and even conservatives orient themselves in opposition to communism.
01:21:11.640And until we can shatter that glass and stop cross-referencing anything, everything against the left, we're going to keep losing.
01:21:21.100Polar Papist says, thank you for your work, Oren. You're the most incisive poster out there. Thank you very much, sir.
01:21:26.600Assuming the country doesn't fall apart. Do you think a Trump presidency can do anything to affect the, uh, the way universities, uh, form the managerial class?
01:21:35.740Yes, I think it can do plenty. Will it is a much bigger question.
01:21:39.680They just laid out a proposed, uh, attempt to redo the accreditation process and what the accreditors would need to strip out.
01:21:48.940I just saw this proposal before we went live, so I don't have all the details. Uh, I I'm not ready to break down the, it's viability.
01:21:55.560It said that they would try to seize the, uh, the funding of universities that didn't comply with this. And this is how they would force it down.
01:22:02.920I understand that. I would much rather see a complete undermining of the credentialing process through a two-step process.
01:22:10.340One, you need to build certifications instead of degrees in the same way that tech builds this stuff. You, you go, you take a test. Now you're certified in this thing.
01:22:20.060You didn't need to go to college. You didn't need to go through the, the whole process. You just have the certification and it's done. Second, you need to get rid of, uh, you need to get rid of Greggs versus Duke power and the 1990 civil rights inculcation of that, uh, or instantiation of that, uh, ruling.
01:22:37.300Cause originally it was basically thrown out by the Supreme court. And then the Republicans, you know, froze it in, in, in time. People do not understand what disparate impact does, but among the many insane things that it does, it makes IQ or, uh, aptitude tests illegal for, uh, for employment.
01:22:54.920And so that means that basically your university system is a highly ideological, highly ideological and very expensive replacement for a basic test that could take an hour. And so we need to get rid of those two things. If we actually want to reform this, I see what some of the, what the Trump administration is doing. I think it would be better than what we have, but it is insufficient. And it will, I think, end up going right back to Marxist leftism if they leave it the way it is.
01:23:19.960Same problem that Yarvin explained with the state department. These institutions are left to seminaries with a thin veneer of education on them. And if you leave them the way they are, uh, even if you, you know, swap out some of the personnel, it's simply not going to be sufficient.
01:23:35.020I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
01:23:37.720My father is a board game from 1911 and the board game, it's the game of life, but it's corporate success. And so the purpose of the game is you start at this company as a mail boy,
01:23:47.860and then you get gradually promoted until you're the CEO of the company. And that was just considered
01:23:52.860completely normal a century ago. And we've completely done away with that due to the college system where
01:23:58.560this is actually why America has the lowest social mobility of any period in our history. It's mostly due
01:24:03.860to college where I think you can actually assess for someone's competency on a job. Once they're on the job,
01:24:10.640the problem is that in large bureaucratic systems, especially with the civil rights law,
01:24:14.760college is one of the few things that you can assess people for and discriminate by. And I think
01:24:20.240college is, it's college plays into the civil rights, the civil rights issue. And I think the
01:24:30.420civil rights act is one of the biggest issues conservatives face. And it's also really difficult
01:24:35.440because trying to convince a boomer about how dangerous the civil rights act was is an uphill battle
01:24:41.880because they've been propagandized their whole life that civil rights is the most important thing.
01:24:46.100And I do support, like, I'm glad Jim Crow ended, but at the same time that you have to separate the
01:24:51.460ending of Jim Crow and legal equality with civil rights, because, because people, and Richard Hanania
01:24:59.200covered this really well, where almost all of wokeness is downstream of the civil rights act,
01:25:04.300where it was pushed by the government in the silliest way possible. Because keep in mind,
01:25:09.860the federal bureaucracy determines how laws get implemented. And as an example of this,
01:25:15.640we use national level race stats on a regional level, which is complete madness, where most of
01:25:22.320Pennsylvania is 95% white, you have Philly and Pittsburgh that are plurality black. But if you're
01:25:28.860trying to balance out national racial stats in a place like, I don't know, Lancaster, Pennsylvania,
01:25:34.380it's going to horribly backfire, because there aren't the black or the Latino or the Asian population
01:25:39.940to reach the national level equilibria. And what I said, a big reason why the left lost this last
01:25:47.360election is it was Californians and New Yorkers trying to push their racial demographics onto the
01:25:52.800rest of the country. While the Rust Belt and the Sun Belt, or the two swing areas, are both of their
01:25:59.220major voting populations are disproportionately white. And so that's not going to work. And
01:26:04.300unless we redo the civil rights act, we're going to be stuck in this whole DEI system where you can be
01:26:10.600prosecuted for if your company, and there's some really ridiculous examples where I think Tesla,
01:26:17.620a guy was awarded either 10s or hundreds of millions of dollars, because he potentially heard racial slurs in
01:26:24.060the bathroom, something like that. And he didn't even have proof for it. So keep in mind, the people
01:26:29.220enforcing these laws are completely unhinged. And that's why a rule that seemed sensible at the time